On Monday night, T Magazine held its annual party to help kick off the Salone del Mobile design fair in Milan. For the sixth year, visitors flocked to Villa Necchi Campiglio, the 1935 Rationalist-style house designed by Italian architect Piero Portaluppi. But this year, the reason for the celebration was twofold: The event also marked the magazine’s 20th anniversary, and to mark the occasion, T editor-in-chief Hanya Yanagihara commissioned Parisian multidisciplinary artist Ramdane Touhami to oversee the party’s design.
“There are T’s everywhere,” Touhami said of his concept, which involved turning the magazine’s bevelled, all-caps logo into everything from ice cubes to several installations on the villa’s grounds. At the property’s entrance, guests posed for photos in front of a petrol blue backdrop formed by three silver T’s. And later, after wandering down the dirt road to the house – perhaps picking up a flute of champagne from one of the many servers stationed along the way – encountered reflective letters placed on the stone pergola of the house and writing “T Magazine at 20.”
Touhami, 49, was born in the South of France and is the founder of the Paris-based creative agency Art Recherche Industrie. His three-decade career has ranged from retail projects – he turned the 19th-century French perfume company Officine Universelle Buly into a modern beauty brand before selling it to luxury group LVMH in 2021 – to designing type and typefaces through his Swiss printing house. type and typography studio, the Société Helvétique d’Impression Typographique. More recently, he’s set his sights on hospitality: For the party, Touhami flew in bartenders from the Drei Berge Hotel, a chalet-like property that opened in Mürren, Switzerland, in 2022. The bar was even designed to look like a forest. green facade.
Throughout the night, guests mingled in the garden for cocktails – rose and grapefruit Negronis, Aperol or limoncello spritzes with basil and Pimm’s punch – and dined on dishes prepared by Parisian chef Rose Chalalai Singh, who devised a menu of inventive Thai Italian snacks. There was curry pizza, takeout boxes filled with spicy Thai tagliatelle, puffed rice crackers spread with Bolognese ragout, and cheese-stuffed arancini made with glutinous rice instead of the traditional carnaroli or arborio varieties.
If not outside the pool, the attendees – including British designer Bethan Laura Wood, Milanese architect Massimiliano Locatelli, MoMA curator of architecture and design Paola Antonelli, New York-based designer Stephen Burks and fashion designers Maximilian Davis . by Ferragamo, and Sabato de Sarno, by Gucci — wandered into the private rooms of the Villa Necchi, where tutors were on hand to point out Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings and Picasso’s sketches. Many also looked at an adjacent showroom, where kitchen brand Gaggenau is holding its annual presentation. (The company provided Chalalai Singh’s team of chefs with its grill station, which Touhami arranged to form a giant T.)
Although the party started promptly at seven, it really started as the sun went down. Pink and blue spotlights illuminated Touhami’s mirrored letters, including T-shaped Mylar balloons that floated in the pool, creating a disco ball effect in the flower-filled garden. As darkness fell, the tension rose and an impromptu dance floor formed around DJ Nari Fshr, who played hits like Crystal Waters’ “Gypsy Woman” and Diana Ross’ “Upside Down.” Savory snacks were replaced with desserts: fluffy, colorful Ts-shaped madeleines and white chocolate lollipops from Milanese patisserie and restaurant Sant Ambroeus. As guests left the villa’s wrought-iron gates around 11 p.m., they were each given a bag containing a notebook bound in Dedar cloth, T’s latest design theme — and a bag of pasta shaped, of course, like the letter of the afternoon. “T pasta is very funny,” Touhami said of the souvenir. “No one had done it before.”